Wow. Just saw The Predator movie. It was awful. Me and the other two guys I went with were the only people in the theater and we had the best time making fun of it while it was trainwrecking along.

You can tell that some of the cast tried but Shane Black has either totally lost it or mailed it in. Regardless, it was a symphony of dysfunction. I cannot recommend it enough if you really want a good old fashioned no plot mess waste of 100 minutes. If you're looking for quality entertainment, however, don't bother.

It basically sounds like a movie that was ashamed to be a Predator movie, and one that might have worked better if it had just been its own franchise. But allegedly, what a lot of studios do is just sit on potentially valuable properties and make tweaks to unused scripts and just shove them into said property to make a quick cash in film.

POTENTIAL SPOILERS AHEAD -

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Things that I've heard:

- According to this movie, autism is not only a desirable trait, but is the key to qualities like leadership and will be part of the next evolution of humanity.

- The film supposedly spends 10 minutes or more talking about how stupid the name "Predator" is for the titular aliens of the film.

- The film retcons the Predators habit of taking trophies and turning it into this thing where they extract spinal fluid and use it to improve themselves, taking desirable traits from their prey. Because of course, the creature you just easily killed because it's weaker, slower, less durable, less agile and has slower reflexes than you is the exact thing you need for an upgrade.

- Predators come to hunt during the hot months because of Global Warming, and try to kill us before Global Warming does.

- The thing that will save the human race is a suit of Predator-buster Iron Man armor.

You are correct on all counts. I kinda though the retcon about the "spinal fluid upgrades" was a neat angle until I started thinking what you stated and then I just laughed harder at the whole thing. It was so ludicrous. I'm not kidding when I say it was one of the best movie going experiences I've had in a long time. We had such a good time laughing about how bad it was.

And in addition to the autism thing, Thomas Jane's character had Tourette's. Stereotypical Tourette's played for laughs, of course. Yeah...

You are correct on all counts. I kinda though the retcon about the "spinal fluid upgrades" was a neat angle until I started thinking what you stated and then I just laughed harder at the whole thing. It was so ludicrous. I'm not kidding when I say it was one of the best movie going experiences I've had in a long time. We had such a good time laughing about how bad it was.

And in addition to the autism thing, Thomas Jane's character had Tourette's. Stereotypical Tourette's played for laughs, of course. Yeah...

It's one of those "reinvent the wheel" moments for me, since the Dark Horse's Predator comics already provided a couple of possible explanations to the entire thing (which basically boiled down to "hunting is a socially acceptable way to vent their pent up aggression", i.e. Pon-Far).

You are correct on all counts. I kinda though the retcon about the "spinal fluid upgrades" was a neat angle until I started thinking what you stated and then I just laughed harder at the whole thing. It was so ludicrous. I'm not kidding when I say it was one of the best movie going experiences I've had in a long time. We had such a good time laughing about how bad it was.

And in addition to the autism thing, Thomas Jane's character had Tourette's. Stereotypical Tourette's played for laughs, of course. Yeah...

It's one of those "reinvent the wheel" moments for me, since the Dark Horse's Predator comics already provided a couple of possible explanations to the entire thing (which basically boiled down to "hunting is a socially acceptable way to vent their pent up aggression", i.e. Pon-Far).

It was just one of those things that didn't need to be any more complicated than the initial film presented. It's an alien with it's own alien culture. It likes to hunt and it collects trophies from the prey that it had the most fun/challenge with. It didn't really need any further elaboration, at least for the films. The Predator is a sci-fi horror monster.

I'm someone who loves world-building, but Predators really were suppose to just be mysterious alien threats. If you start getting into their culture and society and really flesh them out, you get things like the necessity for Predator janitors, Predator dentists, Predator fry cooks, etc. And unless you're eventually planning to have the Predators join some Federation at some point and open diplomatic relations with Earth, it's better to just not examine their society too much because it (for lack of a better term) humanizes them. They're no longer these strange, terrifying alien beings whose rules we barely understand, they basically become intergalactic space rednecks who are going on some drunk hunting spree.

With the original Predator film, we got almost nothing about the aliens society, it's reasoning, its culture, etc. We got some stories about how it would regularly come to Earth during hot times of the year, butcher people, and we slowly got some idea about how and why it killed people. It was a fun menace that didn't need a lot of elaboration. The second movie built on things a bit, but still didn't overdo it.